Watershed

Assassination was my generation's Pearl Harbor

November 16, 2003|By Jeff Davis. Jeff Davis is a Chicago writer whose book about George Halas will be published next year.

Friday morning, Nov. 22, 1963, was a sunny and pleasant pre-Thanksgiving day in Columbus, Ohio. I was 22, about to leave my parents' home for the Navy on the morning of a day that would become the biggest day of my generation, our Pearl Harbor, and would remain so until 9/11.

I held a ticket on a mid-morning TWA flight to Idlewild Airport in New York, with an afternoon connection on the Eastern shuttle to Providence, R.I. From there I would catch a bus to the nearby Newport Naval Base to join 500 other young men entering the Navy's Officer Candidate School.

On the way to the Columbus airport, the lead news story on my mother's car radio was President Kennedy's vital political visit to Texas, accompanied by the first lady and Vice President and Lady Bird Johnson.

On the ground at Idlewild in New York, where each airline had a stand-alone terminal, I loaded my lightly packed overnight bag into a shuttle bus for the short hop from TWA to Eastern.

I was looking out the window when a man seated across the aisle with a transistor radio to his ear shouted over the roaring bus engine. "Hey, they just cut in and said someone's shot Kennedy in Dallas!" He paused as the few passengers aboard gasped. "They say he was hit!" the man shouted. My stomach jumped. This was insane.

"They don't know how bad!" he said again as the bus stopped at Eastern. I got out, reached into my shirt pocket for a new pack of cigarettes, lit one, and ran inside with my suitcase to the bar and the nearest television. I had hours to kill.

The clock hanging from the ceiling over the middle of the huge circular bar read 1:40. The black-and-white television sets above the liquor racks were tuned to CBS, with Walter Cronkite in shirtsleeves instead of his usual suit jacket.

Something was definitely wrong.

The concern showed on Cronkite's face as the news began to form its sorrowful shape. I ordered a beer and lit my second cigarette in five minutes. Those in the bar smoked frantically and ordered drinks as fast as the bartenders could serve them.

Cronkite did not say the bullet had blown a massive hole in Kennedy's skull and killed him on the spot. He reported that Kennedy had been rushed to Parkland Hospital. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Gov. John Connally was critically wounded and reported near death. LBJ was safe.

Kennedy was pronounced dead shortly after 2 p.m., Eastern time. The news exploded in a series of developments. They had caught the guy they thought had shot him: Oswald. CBS reported Oswald might have killed a Dallas cop. Nothing made sense now.

Only a few hours on my own, and the president, my leader, was dead before I got where I was supposed to go.

I got off the plane in Providence in time to see a new president, Lyndon Johnson, tell the nation at Andrews Air Force Base that we must carry on. Then Bobby Kennedy boarded Air Force One and returned with Jackie as the president's coffin was lowered off the plane and placed inside a hearse bound for Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy.

Other OCS-bound guys were riding the airport bus to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Providence. We checked into our rooms, then went out for dinner to find a virtually deserted downtown Providence. Portraits of Kennedy, framed in black, stared back from store windows to honor New England's favorite son.

Television sets played to an empty restaurant while we dined that night. It was all Kennedy. The networks kept replaying the events of the day, in sequence. It started at the breakfast in Ft. Worth. Jack Kennedy, on videotape, was in top form, one-liner after one-liner delighting his audience. How can he be dead, I kept asking myself. He's so alive!

They didn't show the Zapruder film. The public didn't know it existed at that hour. For me, the worst part was watching the Kennedys work the fence at Love Field, then enter the limousine.

"Don't get in the car," I said under my breath. "Please don't get into that car!"

Even though four decades have passed, whenever I see that clip, I still say those words to myself. "Please don't get into that car." Kennedy gets in every time, of course, as fate decreed he must.

The Navy put us to work the next morning as soon as we reported to the Newport base and imposed a strict news blackout. Televisions and radios were forbidden. Phone calls were not allowed. That's the way it was. We didn't know whether the assassination was a conspiracy or random act. Did this mean war? With whom? From time to time that weekend, an upperclassman would deliver the latest word from outside the base gates. That's how we heard on Sunday that Lee Harvey Oswald had been shot.

We neither saw nor shared the common images that seared into the brains of virtually all of America the rest of that long weekend: Kennedy's coffin lying in state in the Capitol rotunda, Jack Ruby gunning down Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station, John John's salute outside the church, the cortege to Arlington, the lighting of the eternal flame.

I was able to recapture some of those lost days a few months before I mustered out of the Navy in 1967. I was the officer in charge of choosing the nightly movies to entertain the crew of my ship, the carrier USS Randolph. The list included the U.S. Information Agency's "Years of Lightning, Days of Drums." I chose it as much for myself as the others aboard.

That film, narrated by Gregory Peck, depicted the four days that we had lost that grim November in 1963, interspersed with bright images from the brief Kennedy presidency. I often have wondered how many of my OCS classmates ever saw that film or whether they never recovered those lost days 40 years ago that changed so much.